Last Thursday, David Kaye, the U.N's newest free speech watchdog, released a groundbreaking report calling upon states to promote strong encryption and anonymity. Kaye assumed the role of Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression in August 2014, and this, his first report, will be presented at the 29th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva mid-June.

His analysis comes at a key moment. The ability to communicate anonymously and to use encryption is more important than ever and the Rapporteur rightly notes that privacy is a gateway for freedom of opinion and expression, saying:

Two years ago today, Glenn Greenwald published in the Guardian a single document confirming a key piece of the NSA's surveillance program, a document that fundamentally transformed EFF's long-running battle for an end to unchecked government surveillance. To recap briefly, the document was a secret court order issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act directing Verizon to provide "on an ongoing daily basis" all call records for any call "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls" and any call made "between the United States and abroad." As the days passed, we learned that this document was only one of many crucial disclosures made by Edward Snowden, an NSA whistleblower who has made incredible personal sacrifices in order to disclose information that the American people, and the world, have long deserved to know.

Last week Monica Chew, formerly of Mozilla, and Georgios Kontaxis, of Columbia University, published a paper detailing the proposed new Firefox Tracking Protection technology. With Tracking Protection enabled they found that they received 67.5% fewer cookies and reduced page load time by an astonishing 44% while browsing the Alexa top 200 news sites. Despite these impressive results, Tracking Protection remains deeply hidden in the browser's most obscure settings system, and is not on track to be offered even to Firefox's beta users for testing and improvement. We agree with Monica: Firefox needs to enable Tracking Protection—at least for users who enable Private Browsing mode—and make it an easy option in all cases.

The discovery last week of another major flaw in TLS was announced, nicknamed "Logjam" by the group of prominent cryptographers who discovered it. It's getting so hard to keep track of these flaws that researchers at INRIA in France created a "zoo" classifying the attacks (which is not yet updated to include Logjam or the FREAK attack discovered in March). Despite the fact that these attacks seem to be announced every few months now, Logjam is a surprising and important finding with broad implications for the Internet. In this post I'll offer a technical primer of the Logjam vulnerability.